Bernard Malamud Quotes

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.

One's fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer - he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

If you don't hear His voice so let Him hear yours. When prayers go up blessings descend.

Nationality isn't soul.

Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.

If your train's on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

... it's possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.

If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

We have in my country (Russia) a quotation: "It is impossible to make out of apology a fur coat.

I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.

You could not pity anything if you weren't a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.

For misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

There are no wrong books. What's wrong is the fear of them.

Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

Charity you can give even when you haven't got.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

Politics isn't in my nature.

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

A man had to learn, it was his nature.

The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.

(Clothes) cannot change a man's nature. He's either kind or he isn't, with or without clothes.

It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.

All men are Jews, though few men know it.